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Attending to the Wound

ATTENDING TO THE WOUND

-The deficit of care in a modern world

I don’t know how to be with my feelings of discomfort around what
is happening in our world at this time. When I look around me I feel so bereft
at the ways we are desecrating the fabric of life. I feel that as a woman it
has taken all of my might to address the intricate weave of my own trauma at
having been born into a patriarchal culture where care and reverence for the
vulnerabilities and fine sensibilities of our humanness are so insidiously
brutalized. I believe that there is a shut down that happens to our
relationship to self, to our capacity to be attuned to our own instinct and to
the wisdom of our intuitive responsiveness when we are born to a culture that
pathologizes our biological needs for autonomy, intimacy, kindness and care. I
feel this vast vacuum where these qualities should exist and in it’s place I
see fear and the institutionalization of those in need of care, our children,
the sick, the poor, those experiencing psychological crisis, the birthing, the
elderly, the dying.

I feel the great trembling, thunderous dearth of the Feminine
Voice in the world in which we are currently living, She lies bound and gagged
and buried and She is thundering to be released from the throats of Her
children, in the words and deeds of Her sons and daughters. We are all crippled
by her absence in our lives, the lack of Her compassionate, inclusive, fiercely
loving heart in our world has left me often feeling lost and confused and
hungering for what is longed for but unknown, grieving for the agonizing
vacancy where Her power should thunder and keen, croon and restore.

I believe we are each being called to acknowledge the pain of Her
absence from within the folds of our beings, to allow Her suppressed justice,
Her unflinching allegiance to nourishment and inclusivity, balance and truth to
birth itself through us. She is asking us to feel our pain and accept that the
current cultural paradigm we are existing within is an intolerable wasteland,
devoid of true comfort and belonging. She is imploring us to unbundle our own
stories of suppression and pain, for the truth is that our privilege amongst
the ranks of the race of the colonial imperialists does not exclude or exempt
us from its violent annihilation of our sense of belonging to the finely
attuned web of life on the Mother Earth. We amongst the Western culture are all
indigenous to this Earth, in each of us exists DNA that descends from those who
for survivals sake, existed in harmony with the reciprocal tapestry of
creation, deeply bonded to one another and the environment upon which we
depended, we are not exempt from the deadeningly brutal anti-spiritualism of
our time.

Where is our sacred rage at the atrocities committed in our
names? How is it that we can stand by while our planet is violently degraded,
human rights are disregarded, our fellow species annihilated? Where has the
voice of the people gone? Where is the grass roots power that would create the
change? Where is our courage? Where is our voice? The Internet and the facile
surrogacy for intimacy it offers to us, the addicted hoards, might be one of
the reasons for the screaming vacuum of our silence.

I feel in my own being, the ways in which we are taught in our
culture that it is not safe to need, that to be called needy is to be insulted.
We continuously subsume our true needs in order to collude with a world that
does not attune to the true needs of our humanness, in a world where emotional
vulnerability is scorned. I feel so often bereft in my experience of grief and
the disconnection I feel from what I know only in its absence. As though my
body has been asking since the moment of its conception, Can I trust this
container? Can I bring all of myself here in the knowledge that all of me can
be deeply met? The implacable imperative of this question has been
nonnegotiable for me in my life, as so often the answer was no, as I have
retreated from presence and consciousness, escaping my body for the lack of
safety I have felt in the world around me.

I have felt so emotionally triggered by this traumatic experience
of not feeling safe to offer myself to life, I feel the ways in which the
traumas of my normal western birth, upbringing and education have kept me
isolated in my mistrust that I will be met with true nurturance and compassion.
I look around me in the world, at the wide scale experiences of sexual abuse,
the harsh and unfeeling treatment of asylum seekers, the trauma of our
indigenous people over their ongoing experience of colonization, the
brutalization of our natural environment, the insidious disintegration of our
rights to choose how we birth our babies, the compromise to our right to be
guided by personal conscience in regard to the choices we make for our
children’s health and wellbeing and I ask where is the voice of the fierce
Mother? Where is She who protects and unflinchingly stands powerfully in
defense of the vulnerable and the lost and the wounded, those in the tender
threshold’s of life’s transitions?

Those who choose to bring themselves to the task of caring
somewhere in the web of their lives, who accept our true state of unaccountable
indebtedness, of immersed reciprocity do so courageously, against the trend of
our culture, they do it unpaid or underpaid, and unacknowledged in the eyes of
our world, and I honour them. To enact care and show kindness and compassion to
those in need, or who depend upon others for their survival, in the full
knowledge and attendance to the needs of one’s own self is a radical act in our
culture, an act of political activism and I wonder what might become of our
world if more of us stopped and acknowledged the real needs we carry beneath
our wounds and chose to care and comfort our own selves and others more.

I name myself as one of the walking wounded, I carry within me
places shrouded in grief and shadow that I have not yet learnt to heal and
release. I have experienced deep longings for meaning and intimacy, I have harboured at times
crippling feelings of inadequacy and bereavement within my self, for the
unformed and aborted aspects of my psyche. I am in continuous relationship with
the ironic and sometimes agonizing duality of longing for love and intimacy
while simultaneously, unconsciously pushing it away in defense. I have for the
bulk of my life been unable to view my own self with loving, compassionate
eyes. There is a brutality to my own self-scrutiny. My mistrust of self has led
me to often only know myself through the eyes of the other.

This impulsive hungering for external validation, like the baby
crying in her cot or hungering for the breast on a regimented feeding schedule
creates a relationship to stress which is corrosive. This hungering for deep
and authentic succor is fertile breeding ground for addictions, the insatiable
quest to fill and appease the lack and the longing without the risk of
furthering the risk of human rejection. I carry shame around the fact that I am
wounded and hold assumptions that others are not wounded in the ways that I am
wounded, and yet to look at the newspaper is to witness a liturgy of trauma and
neglect, violence, pain and unmet needs. I feel that to incarnate as a woman
fully and powerfully into this life, onto this planet has taken such an immense
tenacity. It has taken every ounce of will I could muster. It feels that to
dwell here in my full feeling capacity and not be annihilated by despair or
hardened by pain is an extraordinary undertaking.

It was only when it came to the task of birthing my own babies
that I truly saw how challenging it was for me to stay deeply present in my
body in the face of intensity, how unsafe it felt for me to embody my own full
power as woman. Each of my birth experiences were a deepening into the claiming
of this presence and power for myself, that I may offer my children the level
of fierce attunement and presence that they have asked of me. In order to do
this I have had to foster an enormous amount of gentleness and tenderness,
forgiveness and tenacity to allow myself to feel the full weight of my
responsibility to care and to also attend to the ways in which I have been
culturally illequipped to execute that level of selfless service. Becoming a
mother has brought me to attend to the uninhabited, mute and defended aspects
of my psyche that were divorced from presence, this has required a fierce
delving into the vulnerable needs of my animal self, my needs for touch and
connection, nourishment and care and attunement in the relationships I hold
with my loved ones.

After the births of each of my babies I have experienced a trepidatious
mixture of utter elation and oxytocic bliss on the one hand and a bone
shuddering anxiety on the other, around keeping these exquisitely innocent and
utterly dependant creatures safe and deeply met by life on a soul level, in a
world that feels at times less than hospitable to those of us who are tender of
heart. There was also such an acute awareness of how exponentially expanded my
capacity for love had become but in equal measure how much more vulnerable to
the potential pain of loss I had become. It is this precarious relationship to
life's duality that I think is numbed in our "death hating" culture.
That to have life is to walk with death by one's side, that to have health is
to deeply understand illness and dis-ease, and that central to true presence is
the need to take full personal responsibility for our own existence, for our
relationship to life and death, to suffering and experience, to fully embrace
the intensity and precariousness and preciousness of our own incarnation.

I wonder if I am so very alone in my experience of woundedness
and despair, or is there in fact a wide spread acculturation of numbing the
pain of isolation and disconnection with materialism and technology. The
insidious belief that to be needy is to be weak, that to be in a position that
requires others to care for us, or at least to offer us compassion and
kindness, supporting us to birth our own selves into being, as each of us has
the capacity to do, is unsafe in our culture. To be vulnerable is very
dangerous in a world where the level of empathy and compassion is so severely
disabled that we can turn away boat loads of hungry and traumatized men, women
and children and then incarcerate them for their need. I know that this is far
from a simple issue but I find our dearth of cultural empathy astounding.

I do not propose that in acknowledging our vulnerability and the
needs that arise from our wounds should we unconsciously ask others to carry
our woundedness for us, but rather that we evolve our capacity to hold ourselves
through radical self-care, through tenacious attending to our capacity to
experience self love. I think it is then that we can truly start to open to
receive and embody the voice of the fiercely protective Mother.

How do we learn to care from the places that are wounded within
ourselves? How do we take responsibility, without blame, for the places that
are barricaded or defended against feeling, against love, against full
ownership of our lives? Is our culture as fully feeling and compassionate as it
could be? Do we bear the full weight of our responsibility to self and other?
Are we willing to fully accept the repercussions of our actions and our
inactions? What would that look like? What if we judged ourselves on how we
treated the most vulnerable in our culture?

I recognize the subtle signs of the deep wound to the feminine
aspect of creation so often in the world around me.I see it in the way we inhabit our bodies, and are so quick
to criticize the vessels that house our souls. I see it in the way we are
afraid of our emotions, the zone out of our addiction to technology, drugs,
alcohol, pornography; in our relationship to food, the way we eat, what we eat,
our eating disorders; in the way we subtly and also overtly cut one another
down in our appraisals of one another, the way we speak ill of one another
behind backs and yet lack the courage to compassionately bring those
differences to bear in person; in the lack of accountability and responsibility
for the undercurrents of our positions; in the lack of tending and owning and
consciously addressing the wounds that we carry; in the horrendously
destructive ways that we treat the Earth, her non-human inhabitants and our fellow humans. It has been said that often those who are suppressed do not
realize that they are suppressed and I think that this is an apt appraisal of
us in the modern civilized world. We do not know what we have lost, we do not
know how afraid we are to speak out against the dominant narrative, we do not
know that in our unconsciousness we are both the oppressed and the oppressor.

I believe that at the heart of our disconnection from our
activated, compassionate, deep feeling selves is the blue print of our cultural
birth and parenting practices. It has taken years of being a “stay at home Mum”
for me to find the wisdom and grace to begin to understand what it looks like
to really attune to the needs of my children, their enormous requirements for
stillness, touch, connection, slowness, intimacy, presence, the capacity to
stay centered when they are overwhelmed with their emotions, and me with mine.
It has been an enormous undertaking to still and nurture the wounded child
within myself in order to come to presence with my own children.

If we attribute blame to the mothers in our lives we continue to
nurse within ourselves an unconscious internalized rage towards the feminine.
The core imperative of the feminine to care, to tend the internal world, to
allow ourselves to inhabit a diffuse, receptive mind and body state, to
centralize consciousness in the body rather than the intellect, is inhibited in
those of us who feel impacted by this wounded feminine aspect, who feel
impacted by the Mother wound. We are a culture with a brutal underbelly of medicalised
birth trauma, sexual abuse, domestic violence. We are all victim to the monster
of economic rationalism and the devastating neglect of the mytho-poetic,
psycho-spiritual realms of our existence. And it is essential that we each
adopt a radical self-responsibility for our own healing.

When our needs as children are not fully met, or when trauma
occurs early in our life, it is natural for the child to perceive this to be
their own fault, an assumption that their needs for touch, nourishment, eye contact,
intimacy are unreasonable and to assume that there must be something wrong with
the wanting, with the longing for these things. I feel that some modern day
parenting advice is tantamount to abuse. Leaving infants to cry alone for
long periods of time, demands on the child to sleep through the night, trends
away from natural childbirth and breast feeding, the employment of child care
very early in a child's life when bonding with a primary care giver is
paramount for the infant’s emotional wellbeing, are all ways of teaching the
beingness of the human that there needs will not be met, their cry will not be
heard, we learn to suppress our need for comfort and care from such a young
age. I believe this primal wound impacts so deeply upon the psyche of our collective
culture. We have made ourselves immune to our own deep primal needs and are
therefore shut down to our empathic responses to the Other. I believe we are a
heart broken culture, pathologically intellect focused, and unable to bring our
deep human potential, our pure primal consciousness to incarnate into our
bodies on the Earth plain.

The wounds that dwell between the hearts of mothers and their
daughters and sons are inflicted by the world, by history and suppression, by
religion and patriarchy, by a culture that subjugates those who care and then
places the blame firmly on their shoulders. I believe in the power of love to
transcend the story of personal wounding, and I envision a collective healing
where our capacity to offer care is seen as something of value and great worth.
For those of us who feel ourselves to be victim of separation from the Mother,
of having not been received in the exact way that our soul might have longed
for and needed as a baby, child or young adult, I invite us all to see this
wound as a gateway to birthing our own selves into the deep, holy love of the
Mother that we long for.

As a woman and a mother I am trying to bring compassion and
forgiveness to those parts of myself that have not fully learnt yet how to
wholly belong to my own self and the lives I have seeded. I am deeply committed
to becoming more of what I believe our birthrite of love is. I am looking now
to take responsibility for my own journey with the sacred wound and wonder how
different the world might look if I stopped blaming my mother for a wounding of
separation from the feminine, from my inner capacity to Mother myself, from the
Earth, that is much deeper than the personal limitations of any one woman.

It is an enormous task we faceas we take responsibility for our wounds and choose to make
different choices in the way we live. I ask myself as the mother of a young
daughter, how can I transcend the acculturation that I received to be a good
girl, to consider the needs of others always above my own? How do I allow the
wild face of the sacred Feminine to express itself through my children, to
still the fear, control and lack of safety, that their boisterous play and
fierce assertion of will elicits within me as someone who was taught to
suppress my voice and subjugate my will? How do I allay the triggering of my
own suppression to make space for Her to shine through them in our lives, with
Her edge of chaos and furry and Her fierce loving heart and sensual freedom and
delight? How do I teach my children to honor the power of their own feminine
traits, to listen fiercely to their own hearts and to learn the language of
feeling, teaching them to inhabit the intensity of their own bodies without
shaming or suppressing the raw primacy of this energy?

Central to this narrative is the notion of time. We are all
pathologically busy in our culture, phobic of spaciousness and the timeless
strata of existence. To stop and poise and listen is to invite a flood of guilt
around our productivity and purpose, shame around our worth and value. But all
action becomes empty when we fail to source true direction from within. The
quality of deep listening required to hear and heed the true imperative of the
moment requires enormous attunement to the needs of the self, requires
establishing a responsible communication with the needs of our inner realms,
requires a radical valuing of stillness over habitual motion, emersion in the
language of the soul as well as a literacy in the language of the culture.

We require a powerful coming home to the needs of our own
beingness, a tender mothering of the requirements for attunement and care to
the deep longings and hungers of our own interiors, and sometimes the finding
of this attunement to self requires that we honour the suppressed processes of
grief which we have overridden for a lifetime, a saying “yes” to unwept tears
and mute rage and blind fury and tender keening. In order to heal our wounds we
must come to create new and individual relationships to time and space, so that
we may transcend the cultural imperative to stay busily removed from our own
true impulses to care and commune.

The imperative to love, care and attend to our own deep needs is
brutally neglected in our time and this is perhaps the first place we must all
look in redressing the balance of care in our world. How do we learn to take
care of our own needs in a culture that would subsume all of our energy with
its outward, goal-oriented imperative? This contract we hold with our culture is fully supported by our
tendency to bounce back out when we look in, deflecting out from the pain and
grief we encounter in our own interiority, the wealth of our own neglect. It
takes a great courage and a faith in the bigger picture to override this
culture of neglect to the deep feminine core of our own selves.

It feels frightening to me to share my heart in this way, deeply
vulnerable, but I also feel that this is the great travesty of our modern
existence, that the soft and tender, the vulnerable and internal, can find no
foothold, trampled underfoot by all the brash certainty, the punitive
superiority and adversarial posturing. There are days when I feel like a tender
child, my eyes brimming with unnamed tears and in all the 40 years of life,
I’ve never really been able to step out from the dark, interior embrace of my
own woundedness, because I am still swaddled close to the breast of that source
of pain, because I have never been able to stride bold and certain of myself
into the shiny and bright world with a sure sense of what it is that I am here
to offer, assured of my belonging and unabashed in my sense of worthiness.
Because my wound will not yet set me free of its imperatives, I wonder if there
is something of the wound that is asking to be brought to the light of the
world.

Sometimes I have an inkling that the darkness is not only
something to be transcended in order that we may stand in the light, but rather
it is a polarity of equal measure, an equivalent power to the light, and that
to enter into it, without assurance or direction, without torch or road map is
to enter into the realm of the dark feminine. To say yes to that dark interior
realm of mythos and shadow, uncertainty and dream, birth and death, the
transformation that happens when we embrace that which is not known, that which
is not seen or understood, that which is asking for birth or succor in the dark
primordial womb of the Mother. We must trust our own senses in this place, our
own instincts must be intact, we must know ourselves deep and true, we must be
our own compass and source of authority to turn from the bright light of the
world and turn to the unformed realm. To turn toward the pain, reach into the
wound, move closer to the longing and surrender our knowing and certainty. I
think maybe it is here that we will find Her ferocious love and the courage to
fight for our integrity as a people.

That
deep primordial Feminine consciousness has been persecuted on our planet for
many millennia now and the fear we feel as women and men, that we will be torn
down for speaking out in the name of Her values is well founded. Whilst in the
16th century the witch hunts were blatant and highly visible, they
are now of a much more subtle and internalized nature. It is we ourselves as a
people who undermine and cut down expressions of true feminine power in one
another and in our own selves, with an indoctrination of the danger of being
aligned with feminine values. The edicts of this tyranny are enforced by the
conformity to the hyper rational imperative and the demonization of the Mother
archetype.

I wonder in the years to come what I might tell my grandchildren
about what it was that I did in the face of the elusive and seemingly invisible
but no less brutal atrocities of our time in regard to the wounding done by
institutionalized sexual abuse, the ongoing genocide and abdication of our
responsibility to atone for the treatment of our first nations people, the
violation of human rights in relation to asylum seekers, the erosion of civil
liberties in regards to our capacity to make choices in relation to our own
birthing rights, health care rights and food production rights. I do not know
how to have a voice in our world but I’m determined to try and find one, for
the sake of my children, and for the sake of my grandchildren to come, and the
red thread of my lineage as it weaves its way into the dreams of tomorrow.

I am not sure if my courage is greater than my fear. I do not
know if my faith in my own gut instincts and the whisperings of my intuitive
self are more or less persuasive than my compliance and my compulsion to tow
the line of the dominant narrative, which would keep me silent and homogenized,
which would keep me superficial in my relationship to self and other, which
would keep me passively addicted to the hollow succor of our times rather than
potently imbedded in my own fierce bondedness to the Mother Earth and to my own
bloodline, to the dire needs of our time and to the untended wound of my kind
that festers and in its festering does untold damage to the integrity of the
biosphere.

I feel the need for us to individually and collectively attend to
our personal stories in relation to our own birth and birthing stories, our own
childhoods, to the traumas that might exist embedded in these experiences,
because I feel that we cannot access a transpersonal experience of the feminine
and of her vast compassion and fierce protective capacity, we can’t access her
depth and connected reciprocity and the experience of immersion in a primal
nurturing matrix without addressing the resistance that is formed through the
wounds of the personal. I think for each of us to take responsibility for our
own woundedness in a culture that is devoid of an authentic nurturing ethic is
a radical act of self-responsibility.

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"Beloved Kin, dear ones with eyes that would see and hearts wide enough to forgive the short-comings, I ask that you bear witness to this trepidatious birthing of a part of myself into the world. I offer this because I feel it asked of me in the wee hours of my dark nights, because it is what I am most afraid of and because it is what I want most for myself; to give of that which moves within. The place in which I find myself at the commencement of this endeavour , and what I feel moved to share from that place, feels deeply raw and vulnerable, but beneath the fear of revealing my underbelly is a gentle beckoning to share with the world that which I truly feel myself to be, both that which shines boldly and sings of truth and radiant becoming, and that which dwells yet in the shadow places within, a whisper to unveil the unformed and the as yet unlived, the deep and the dark of me. It is my prayer that something of the truth of this might touch something in the truth of you, so that I might know myself more deeply and so that a shared becoming may come to flower in the space between us, in the space between the within and the beyond. I give my heartfull thanks for your reflection and beholding"